Another Life
by Jacob Flood
Summary: A pair of one-shots. The Capital Wasteland made sure her life was always balanced on a knife-edge. Trouble around every corner, survival the only goal. And she'd handle everything that was thrown at her in the same way she always had: with the complete and utter absence of anything resembling a plan.
1. Another Job

She used the last round in the chamber on the mole rat scavenging around the door. When she kicked it open it swung too easily and she collapsed from the pain in her leg. Half-slumped, she pointed the rifle into the single room and prayed to something there was nobody home. Silence was the only answer.

She heaved herself in and pushed the door closed with the rifle butt. Too exhausted to reload. She dumped the sack against the wall and felt relief surge up her right shoulder. Upright again for a proper look at the power substation. A desk in the back left corner. A file cabinet. A broken bedframe. And her holy grail: a first aid pack almost hidden under dust and dirt.

A single lantern on the desk lit the place, a silent radio alongside. Abandoned then, but not for long. Someone else like her trying to use the place to hole up in. She heaved herself over and yanked the first aid pack open so hard its contents went scattering across the room. A moment's rain of stimpaks and radaway and buffout.

A small blessing: her radiation levels were tolerable. She injected the stimpak into her right leg and felt the pain ease. She eased herself up against the wall and opened the drawers of the desk. The first held, tucked at the back, three bottlecaps. She scooped them into a pocket. Every one counts in the Wasteland.

The second and third drawers were empty. She sighed. Every place she stumbled into had already been picked clean three times over. But you always had to look anyway, always had to peer into every dark corner and under every broken piece of the world.

The file cabinet held more luck: a half-empty box of rounds for her 10mm pistol. She slid them in straight away, wishing her hunting rifle wasn't so close to dry. Always wishing for something. A back door, for instance. When the raiders found her then there was no way out but the way she'd come in. And they always seemed to find her. She reloaded her rifle. Four bullets left.

She thought about going outside. She could ease open the wire gate around the back and flick some switches, see if there was still power in this place. It was unlikely. What was more likely was that the raiders were already outside, and would lob a grenade as soon as she opened the door.

She tested her weight on her repaired leg. Good enough. She toppled the file cabinet onto its side and dragged it across to the door. At least it opened the right way for such a barricade to work. Once she'd made the error of not checking, of forgetting which way a door swung. She still had the scars from that mistake. Only make each mistake once, she told herself again. If you happen to live through it.

She loaded the cabinet's drawers with pieces of the bedframe to make it heavier. Getting out now would mean a complicated and lengthy process. In it for good now. What were the possibilities? The raiders had lost her trail and she could hold up for a while, then get the sack of supplies to Big Town, and get paid. Or the raiders would kill her and take the supplies for themselves. Or she would kill them, get to Big Town, and get paid.

Or she could run. Abandon the supplies outside and head in any direction but the one she'd come from. The raiders wouldn't bother pursuing her then. Would they?

She fiddled with the radio. There was no mic to speak into. No way to call for aid and nobody to call for it. She flinched as the silence was shattered with the sound of a violin. The music washed towards her and broke on her shore. She turned the radio off.

She moved the lantern to the floor and tipped the desk on its side. Another barricade to hide behind. She hunkered down with her pistol. The supplies were in reach but she would not touch them. Not when she could taste her payday. Still, she hoped maybe one of the raiders would have a bottle of something on them when she killed them.

This was the way to think. When she killed them. When she got to Big Town. Red would be grateful. Near-clean food and purified water. Medical supplies, too. A full sack akin to a holy grail in this hellhole.

She waited. Let herself breathe. Don't think of the words 'last stand'. Check the guns again. Five bullets for the rifle, a clip and a half for the pistol. There couldn't have been, what, more than half a dozen raiders? Hard to count with all the running and shouting. She'd killed at least two on her way out. The first silently. She'd been so pleased the second had gotten the jump on her. Hence the limp.

She thought she heard voices outside and lay still behind the desk. Stopped herself breathing. Silence but for her heartbeat. Just someone arguing in her head again.

And then came the thump on the door. The scratch of the file cabinet being pushed across the floor. She wondered if the door had been built to withstand bullets. She fired the rifle anyway. It went straight through the worn metal and she was rewarded with a yelp. There were low voices for a while, then the door started pushing open again.

She fired the rifle again and heard no yelp. Down to three bullets. She decided to wait until she could see some flesh. It came soon enough. Fingers curled around the edge of the door. She fired and two of the fingers became a red mist. The next item that appeared around the door was a submachine gun and she ducked behind the desk.

Something low-calibre, she hoped. Though if the door wasn't bulletproof, why would the desk be? She ducked down anyway. Most of the bullets shot high. Patterning across the wall. She dared a peek and saw a face. She fired but the face jerked back. One bullet. She decided to save it and drew her pistol. Much more secure. Twelve until she had to reload, then six. Almost a luxury.

The door began creaking still further. She waited for the gap and knew she had to act rather than react. The lower calibre might not pierce the door and she didn't have enough bullets to experiment. She inhaled and fired two bullets just as the raider appeared in the gap. The first burrowed into the door. Which answered that question. The second took the raider in the shoulder and their own shot went wide.

Maybe they'd be more careful next time. More wishful thinking. There was a grunt and the file cabinet skidded back, the door thrown wide open. Bullets rained in and she threw herself flat behind the desk. The room took on a pockmarked quality. The desk held, more or less. Solid stuff. An executive suite, maybe. She grinned. The expression evaporated as a bullet came through the desk and grazed her thigh, a little too close to the previous wound.

She got angry and angry at herself for getting angry. She raised her pistol just over the desk edge and fired half a dozen shots. From the human noise and ceasing of the bullet rain, she knew she'd hit something. She took the opportunity to reload. Ten left now, plus the solo bullet in the rifle.

Impossible to tell how many raiders were down. If any. If she'd hit the same one four times or four different ones. She slid sideways and took a peek, not over the top but around the left of the desk. One raider was slumped unmoving half over the file cabinet. Another was leaning against the doorframe and slid down as she watched. A slick bloodtrail left up the frame. She fired another into him. It wouldn't kill her to be sure, but the opposite had turned out to be too close to true too many times.

Two down, then. She couldn't see a shoulder wound or any missing fingers on either of them. She had to assume at least four were still standing. Bleeding, hopefully. Nobody appeared in the doorway. As quietly as she could she turned around and slid to look around the other side of the desk. The view wasn't a whole lot different from there.

Then, just to the left of the doorframe, she thought she saw something. The slightest rise and fall of someone's crooked elbow. Breathing ragged. An impossible shot. A waste of a shot, more importantly. She curled her free hand around the edge of the desk and pointed her gun in a direction she hoped wouldn't kill her. She pulled herself out from cover and saw the full arm and side and head of the raider.

She fired twice. The first cracked the doorframe and send the raider starting away from the wall. Into fuller view and the path of the second bullet. Their neck spurted blood and they staggered forward. Dropped out of sight. A yelled "Wait!" came from somewhere outside.

Here was another moment to act, not react. She fired three times where she knew the raider would appear. Enraged, in the centre of the doorway. One bullet went wide, but the other two hit them in the chest. She wished it were premonition. That at least wouldn't have taken so much lost blood to learn. The raider went down.

Four down then, definitely. That was when the grenade came through the door. It bounced off the desk front and sat in the gap between it and the file cabinet. She didn't have time to get upright. She dropped her pistol and reached for the rifle. That solo bullet wouldn't save her, but the gun's length might. With a one-armed heave, she swung the rifle butt at the grenade.

A stupid decision, but a good enough one. The grenade didn't go far. Only hopped over the file cabinet. Almost lingering on top. She yanked herself down behind the desk more or less in time. The explosion sent the file cabinet back into the room and into the desk. This in turn moved back and pressed her against the wall. She grunted as something in her side cracked. But the decreased momentum worked in her favour.

She listened for a while before showing her head around the desk. The corpses had taken a battering. The sack of supplies was undamaged. And maybe the last raiders outside had taken some choice shrapnel in the eye.

She had four bullets left in the pistol and she kept it trained on the doorway for a long time. Long enough for her arm to get sore. Long enough for her other hand to feel around her ribs and tell that something was cracked, not broken. Long enough to find the bottle of buffout and down two dry pills.

Nothing appeared in the doorway. She was sure the sun was getting lower. The lantern had smashed in the explosion. With her arm shaking as she kept it level, she rose and quickly swapped hands. The weary hand took charge of the rifle and its solo bullet. The scraping and grunting she made getting upright brought no sounds from outside.

No way to tell which side of the doorway to check first. She stepped around the file cabinet and moved to the left. The door itself had swung fully against the inside wall to the right. She moved along to the left, hoping to see a corpse along to the right of the outside wall. Nothing. She thought she heard something breathing, though it stopped when she did.

She leaned the rifle against the wall and took the pistol in both hands. She counted to a hundred. She exhaled then swung around the doorframe. The last raider lay on the dirt, as did some of his entrails. He'd bitten off part of his tongue and his eyes looked at her with fear. Or maybe anger. She didn't stop to check before she shot him twice in the head.

After he slumped back, she walked carefully around the entire substation and looked many times with squinted eyes across the landscape. Nothing else in sight. Only then did she allow herself to crouch and take the raider's ammo. Not that she hadn't gotten through without some bullets to spare, she told herself with a smile.

She checked her wounds and decided they would last until Big Town. Red owed her some medical work, at the very least. She trod inside for the sack and her rifle. She faced the direction that led to the end of this job and started walking. One step in front of the other, across the dry dirt. Just another step. Just another job.


	2. Another Body

She cased every room of the house with her finger on the trigger of her rifle. Nobody home. Time to start another search, then. She hooked the riflestrap over her shoulder and knelt to look under the bed. Nothing. She drew a knife and slashed open what remained of the mattress. A radroach waggled its antenna at her from within the rotted stuffing and attempted to flee the bedroom. She skewered it to the floor and crushed its head with the heel of her boot. Which needed repairing again. She grunted, pulled the knife free, and went back to the mattress. Someone had left a stash of pre-war money at the foot-end but the damp meant it fell apart in her hands. She stood straight and her knees cracked.

She pulled the drawers out from the bedside table, hoping for a hidden stash behind. A single bottlecap sat there. Jagged edge up. Taunting her. She snarled at it and tucked it into a pocket. There hadn't yet come a day where she would've left it behind.

The other upstairs rooms were in a worse condition. No mattresses at all. Dragged off to cushion a hideout or rotted to oblivion. Just rusted and broken bedframes remained. No other furniture, even. The bathroom down the end of the hall had a cracked sink with its plug still in and a tiny pool of gritty water. Some mix of brown and grey that screamed of rad-poisoning. The cabinet above still hung to the wall by a pair of nails. A two-thirds full box of abraxo cleaner was the only thing still on the shelves. She held it up to the window light for a while, shaking the box in case of anything solid and hidden. Nothing, again.

She tried to remember if there was a time when she hadn't resorted to such desperations and came up empty. She put the box back and the cabinet came off the wall. Its fall cracked the sink into two and she jumped back. The water splashed sideways and left another stain on the wall. A small blessing, there. She didn't have a spare pair of trousers.

She waited at the top of the stairs for a while to see if the noise of the falling cabinet brought anybody. When it didn't, she trod down close to the wall side of the stairway. Downstairs was more of a success. Relatively speaking. There was an open bottle of whiskey in the fridge that still had a few mouthfuls left. She took one sip and eventually found the lid in the freezer. She wrapped the bottle carefully in her backpack.

She went out the back doorway. The door itself was missing. She stood there and looked for a long time at the barn. Most of the short side of it nearest to her had collapsed, along with half the roof, and she could see right through to the opposite wall. There was a body in the centre. She walked to the collapsed wall and swung her rifle off her shoulder. The body was on its front and didn't move. She looked for a few heartbeats in each direction, then stepped into the ruined echo of the barn.

The body didn't move as she stepped closer. It didn't move as she prodded at its foot with hers. It didn't move as she flipped its hat off the back of its head. A man with his cheek squashed into the dirt. His one visible eye half-open. A fly crouched on the lid. She used her free hand to pat down his pockets. A couple of bottlecaps and a packet of handrolled cigarettes. A few bits of ammo for a gun she didn't have and couldn't see lying anywhere nearby. She tucked it all into her own pockets. The gains of this trip were looking too bleak when she took another look at his hat.

Widebrimmed but not enough to be a hassle going through doors. Pale brown with just a few spots of blood on the inside. Plenty less than most of her clothes. She flipped it around a few times, flicked a finger under the band. She placed it on the dead man's back for a moment and tugged away the filthy bandanna she was currently using to shield her head from the sun. She left it over the dead man's face and flipped the hat onto her head. She stood and got used to the change in her silhouette.

The dead man was also wearing an ankle-length dark duster coat. Too long for her taste. She'd worked it off his shoulders and was cutting it back to regular jacket-length with her knife when a living man came into the barn. He pointed a long repeater at her. He had dirty stubble and scrags of pale hair across his scalp. The effects of old age or rad-poisoning or a bad haircut. Some combination of the three.

"Give me a good reason not to shoot you," he said. She looked at her rifle, lying by the dead man. "Don't," said the living man. "Stand up." She did.

He took one hand off his gun to wipe his nose and sniff. She kept her hands in front of her and felt the weight of her pistol tucked in her belt behind her back.

"Did you kill him?" he asked. He didn't seem sad to her. But then she was always bad at telling that sort of thing.

"He a friend of yours?" she asked back.

"That change your answer?"

She tilted her right hand. "I didn't kill him," she said.

"Got no reason to believe you," he said. "Ain't been long."

He shifted his grip on the repeater. She nodded and looked at the gathering flies. One landed on her left hand. She let its legs crawl for a second before flicking it away. He tensed but did not shoot her.

"Nothing in the house," she said. His eyebrow twitched.

"I know that," he said. "Ain't nothing anywhere."

She tilted her hand again. "Just have to look underneath."

He laughed and it turned back on him into a cough. He wiped his nose again.

"Just dust and radroaches underneath," he said. "People opening doors get their faces shot off. You ain't said why I should believe you."

"The burden's on you," she said. "You're the one with the gun."

"And you're the one with the body."

She jerked her head towards him. "That thing even work?"

His eyes flicked down to his weapon for a moment. "Want to take a chance?"

She sighed. She looked at the half-collapsed roof and the sweat across the man's brow. She looked at the hole that was forming in the toe of her right boot. She titled it up slightly for a better look. She'd patched it only last week, or so it seemed. Easy to lose track of the days. Not a lot of point to looking at a calendar anymore.

"I'm going to smoke," she said. The man tensed when she pulled out the cigarettes and a box of matches. The latter was getting towards empty.

"Those are his," he said. She nodded and put one between her lips. When she struck the match she thought he was going to shoot her. Instead, he held onto the repeater with one hand and held the other out. "How about you toss me the packet," he said.

She exhaled smoke and let her free hand hang on her waist. "How about this," she said.

"No no," he said. "You ain't dictating terms."

She shrugged and tapped ash onto the dead man's back.

"How about this," he said. "You toss me the packet, and the hat. Leave your bottlecaps and whatever else you got on the ground. Turn and walk away."

"This doesn't seem like a transaction in my favour," she said.

"This ain't a transaction," he said.

She nodded. "How about this," she said. "I keep what's mine. Plus the cigarettes. You keep what's his."

He shook his head. "You don't get to decide when you're looking down the barrel of a gun."

She inhaled smoke before answering. "Thinking that's how we're in this situation."

He smirked. His free hand gestured at the sky. "Us or the world?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Either. Both."

He extended his hand again. "Get to it," he said.

"Alright," she said. She finished her cigarette and ground the butt in the space between the dead man and her rifle. She tossed the cigarette packet. The man caught it and tucked it in a back pocket. She took off the hat and hesitated. "Was really getting to like this," she said.

The man shrugged and gestured at her again. She spun it across to him. He had to take a step to grab the hat out of the air, but the gun stayed levelled on her.

"The coat?" she asked. The man put the hat on. "You could finish this butcher's yourself."

The man frowned and looked at what she'd been doing. She slowly crouched and picked up the half-modified coat. She rose just as slowly. The rough fabric pressing against her palm. She threw it towards him and it spread wide in the air. His view obscured for a second. She drew her pistol and fired two shots through the coat. He got one off that winged her left arm but by the time the coat was in the dirt so was he.

She went over and pointed her pistol in his face but he wasn't breathing. She put the hat back on her head and the cigarette packet in her own pocket. She cleaned her wound with the last of her clean water and bound it with a less clean rag. She retrieved her knife, crouched, and went back to her alteration job on the coat. Something to finish before she went through the pockets of yet another body.


End file.
